Adam, Unity, Part 1-3 (Expanding the Adam universe)

At the Game Developers Conference in 2016, Unity’s Swedish demo team showcased the graphical quality achievable with Unity 5.4 by showing the first installment of Adam. According to Chris Harvey, “it blew people away, not only because it was visually fantastic, but the story was super intriguing with a massive cliffhanger.”

Adam, which went on to win several awards, including a Webby, tells the story of a human whose brain has been erased and imprisoned in a robotic shell. When the hero is expelled from a walled city with a crowd of his fellow prisoners, the newborn cyborg realizes he is exiled in a post-apocalyptic world.

i'm not following unity all that closely at the moment but is there any tech that filters down from these demos into the official releases? like, last time i looked a few months ago there were still no decent out-of-the-box shaders shipping with a unity installation. you had to basically make your own. always keeps me away from playing with unity some more.

anyway, interesting style on display in this one. the youtube compression does not do it any favours tho.

i'm not following unity all that closely at the moment but is there any tech that filters down from these demos into the official releases? like, last time i looked a few months ago there were still no decent out-of-the-box shaders shipping with a unity installation. you had to basically make your own. always keeps me away from playing with unity some more.

anyway, interesting style on display in this one. the youtube compression does not do it any favours tho.

So true, in my opinion Unity needs two things to come as standard, a node based material system and a visual Scripting tool with a load of prebuilt goodies. Here are two great examples.

@thomasp : while I don't know if any tech developped especially for these demos ends up in the engine, I can at least attest that the character assets of the first Adam demo, which are available as a free download, are fantastic learning resources when it comes to setting PBR materials and scenes in Unity.

These assets also come with a special camera post effect necessary for proper exposure control, and this camera effect is *not* part of the default engine files afaik.

@piortrue, they did release the sources for their first adam demo and surely it's going to happen for this one too but i was rather hoping that they'd incorporate useful features from that into their standard distribution. i would expect the actual adam demo content to be very specifically targeted for this cinematic stuff and not at all geared towards game use.

i am looking at doing something for the marketplace of ... that other engine and there after a few tech demos and game releases they now do have rather standardized and pretty good shaders which you can either reuse or build upon. at any rate your assets will fit certain expectations as to what kind of complexity is considered ok, which types of texture channels are to be used and so on.

with unity so far it seems you'd have to do it all yourselves and very likely will end up creating something that does not fit with anyone's requirements out of the box. i'm sure i'm not the only one getting the occasional invitation from them to join their community/marketplace but i find it a bit of a head scratcher how to approach this.

The volumetric lighting and Post processing stack (V1 and V2) used in the demos are both publicly available on Github. Getting them set up is as simple as downloading and double clicking the unity packages. I think their plan - certainly with the post effects anyway - is to integrate it into the standard release eventually, but currently its kept in beta to allow faster development (which is working out really well). The post stack is definitely ready for game use, its all an ubershader and was written with performance in mind. The realtime area and tube lights included in the volumetric package are also relatively inexpensive considering how good they look. The HD scriptable render loop won't be far off now though, which will open a load of possibilities

@thomasp : Well, I would say that at this time Unity already ships with the basic features needed for unified material authoring, including a default PBR material behaving similarly to the default materials of UE4 and TB3. Converting assets between the three is pretty much trivial at this point :

The only missing link is the camera post process effect which, if I understand @tweedie 's post correctly, shouldn't take long to make it to the main distribution. Personally I've simply been shipping a copy of it (taken directly from the Adam files) with my assets and it went through the review process of the Unity store without problems.

@thomasp : Well, I would say that at this time Unity already ships with the basic features needed for unified material authoring, including a default PBR material behaving similarly to the default materials of UE4 and TB3. Converting assets between the three is pretty much trivial at this point :

hey man, sure basic features are there. as someone working on characters i was hoping for things more along the lines of reasonably fancy skin, hair, cloth shaders seeping down from cinematic demos. multi-layered, tile-detailed and fully latest-buzzword-compatible.

Well from what I remember reading about the first Adam demo, a lot of the fancy stuff (animation, physics sim, and so on) was handled through other applications with Unity basically used as a mere renderer. So I would suspect that they probably did similar custom work for materials, but indeed none of that is part of the default/current engine.

That said I am personally always impressed by how clean and snappy Unity is when it comes to working with basic PBR stuff - UE4 might have more fancy tools and features, but personally I am all for environments favoring iteration speed over bells and whistles Whoever is in charge of the Unity roadmap is doing something very right !

I think for unity the role of the asset store is much more important than for unreal. because of that I sometimes have the feeling they leave stuff "open" for asset store packages (shader editor being a good example there). This makes sense to an extend to keep it attractive for 3rd party developers.

Personally I like the very lightweight default projects of unity - but I totally see that it might be super usefull to have a better default package with all the fancy stuff setup, best at good defaults. On the other hand its not too hard to import and setup stuff by yourself, and in the long run its probably better to know how to do it. But its hard to argue - the default unreal scene just loooks way more jucy out of the box.

I think @oglu hit this one on the head. I was very excited, and story wise remain highly intrigued. But the quality on part 3 felt a little lower overall (rushed is the correct word here). This is probably because there is a sudden influx of human faces being shown and animated (new to the series), but I noticed it in other areas as well (e.g., clothing of the "priest" character). Perhaps that was intentional given the ending of part 3? In any case, I look forward to the next installment.

Adam 1 and 2 were pretty close to best in class for in-engine cinematics/tech demos, part 3 looks like an average to mediocre in-engine cinematic. The downgrade was so jarring I had to watch the first two to make sure I didn't have an inaccurate memory of them.

I would go one step further and say that Adam 1 was the only good one. It was made by a different team and it shows. Not only it looks technically superior to the other two, but it stands on its own pretty well as a short. Adam 2 was bogged down with a ton of needless exposition and didn't have much else to offer. It looked worse too. Adam 3 was flat out bad.

And the direction/cinematography in the new ones is far worse as well.

Look at this image: Top is Adam 1, bottom is Adam 3.One is a well composed, visually interesting, evocative shot, and the other one looks like a random screenshot from a 10 year old MMO.

Dunno what happend at part 3 man. Part 2 I watched atleast 5 times because of it's OOMPH value. Please go back to that quality and make more stuff. If doing day-time is hard than just stick to doing night shots, I don't care as much about in-engine tech going forward, it will go forward without Oats studio, but keep doing these stories please, they are inspiring.

the 3rd one hurts me so much to look at, i love unity, but it feels rushed, first episode still my favorite. The photogrammetry is really disappointing, in the 3rd one, along with some of the background work. But i love the character animations, holy hell.

yep its coming with the HD path as they call it, which is coming after LD (which is about now-ish). There's a full shader editor too Unity's upcoming stuff moves it to the forefront in terms of quality and as for speed the SRP system makes it so that you can significantly optimise to your needs, it's top notch.

yep its coming with the HD path as they call it, which is coming after LD (which is about now-ish). There's a full shader editor too Unity's upcoming stuff moves it to the forefront in terms of quality and as for speed the SRP system makes it so that you can significantly optimise to your needs, it's top notch.

They're kitted out with some of the best graphics programmers right now, Eric Heitz, Sébastien Lagarde (responsible for bringing DICE's Frostbite engine up to PBR). I'm excited for the future of Unity personally, I might play with the Scriptable Render Pipeline some time.

I would really like to know what happened with the third episode. Like others have stated, it just looked rushed and not as much care put into it. The entire time the prophet is on screen his robes just kill me with all of the jumble on the back of his neck and shoulders. ADAM ep.1 and 2 were both mind-blowing in my opinion. It seems almost like an over reliance on photogrammetry? I don't know but I do wish we could get answer on that. At least as a sobering experience about the possible difficulties of production.